PC hard freezing while gaming, related to TPM but turning it off doesn't fix the issue.

demonicmelon · August 31, 2023

My PC randomly started freezing while playing games a month ago or so. I've tested every piece of hardware, updated everything, but the only "fix" that I've been able to find is to turn TPM off in the BIOS. While this does fix the issue after booting from the "changed" BIOS, when I restart my PC games start freezing again (Even though TPM is still off). So basically, I have to reset my BIOS every time I want to boot up my PC and play games without freezing.

I also saw people mentioning disabling the "Global C-State" option in BIOS, which I also did. It didn't do anything as far as I can tell.

I've seen that many people suffer from this same issue, related to AMD processors and TPM. I only found out this problem was because of TPM thanks to the Event Viewer, with the whole "SCP Certification" error. Problem is, after turning off TPM that error disappears but the PC keeps freezing.

BIOS, Chipset Drivers, Windows 11, GPU Drivers, etc. all are up to date, so I know it's not caused by old drivers. I've also tried rolling back my BIOS and GPU drivers, but nada. (Incidentally, I used DDU to clean install old GPU drivers, which completely broke Windows Spotlight on the lock screen for some reason. I'm just gonna ignore that for now, though.)

Another thing to add, I noticed that I can reliably reproduce this freezing issue by downloading something in the background while I play games. I tested and diagnosed my SSD in case that was also causing problems but I haven't found anything.

So that's all I know. PC freezing while gaming, disabling TPM fixes issue but not entirely, and downloading games in the background has something to do with it as well. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Edited August 31, 2023 by demonicmelon
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demonicmelon · September 1, 2023

Update: I reset my PC yesterday as a last resort, but unfortunately the problem persists. I also ran ramtest86 but nada.

demonicmelon · September 27, 2023

Resurrecting this post because I still haven't found a solution. Does anyone have any updates?

Mark Kaine · September 28, 2023

5 hours ago, demonicmelon said:

Resurrecting this post because I still haven't found a solution. Does anyone have any updates?

tbh.. description is unclear - i understand the issue, but other than that its not clear to me what you did...

On 9/1/2023 at 11:24 AM, demonicmelon said:

Update: I reset my PC yesterday as a last resort, but unfortunately the problem persists. I also ran ramtest86 but nada.

what OS do you have?

by reset do you mean some kind of software repair or "reset" or completely new reinstall? (of what OS?)

Mark Kaine · September 28, 2023

5 hours ago, demonicmelon said:

Resurrecting this post because I still haven't found a solution. Does anyone have any updates?

FULL SYSTEM SPECS?

demonicmelon · October 1, 2023

Full system specs:

R5 2600x
16GB 3000mhz
RTX 2060 6gb
Running Windows 11

I meant that I formatted the PC (reinstalled w11), although that didn't work. This is basically the issue that I'm dealing with explained here:
https://community.amd.com/t5/processors/scep-certificate-enrollment-initialization-errors-are-back-again/td-p/546630/page/4

The most common "solution" I could find for this is turning TPM off through BIOS but unfortunately this doesn't fix the issue for me either.

Edit: I don't know if this piece of information will help, but here goes.
I experience crashes the most in Baldur's Gate 3 right now. And while it freezes up "normally" %80 of the time, sometimes it stars acting a bit weird before it does. The music stops suddenly, then the characters start T-posing and moving around without animations. At this point I can move around for like a few seconds, but it freezes completely after that.

I've also experienced freezes in loading screens in several games.

All this led me to believe that perhaps there might an issue with my SSD, which I had installed anout 3 weeks before this issue coming up. It was running perfectly fine for those first 3 weeks, but since it's the last piece of hardware I'd installed I suspected it could be related somewhat. These errors still come up in the event viewer whenever i freeze though:

These 4 warnings and errors always show up when I freeze with the TPM on. If I turn off TPM, I only get the two "warning" messages.

demonicmelon · October 4, 2023

Okay, another update. This time, however, is a bit different.

So I still haven't been able to fix this issue. But, I have figured out what the issue is (kind of?) I was playing Lies of P, and for the last few days I actualy hadn't gotten any issues. I hadn't played it for more than an hour though, so I wasn't really sure.

But today, while downloading another game through Steam and watching a video on my second monitor, the game froze up during a loading screen. I had actually noticed this behaviour before: games would freeze on loading screens or while something was being downloaded in the background. These points led me to believe that the SSD might be acting up.

I restarted the game, and had Steam download in the background with task manager open on my second monitor. No issues yet, okay... Then I opened a video on youtube (using a macro on my keyboard) and the PC immediately froze up. When I looked at the task manager, I saw that my SSD usage shot up to 100%! I was able to recreate this issue as well.

So... Yeah. I'd seen people either replace or reseat their SSD's to solve this issue, but crystaldisk came up clean and this was only happening in games so I had just assumed that it was my CPU. I guess I was wrong. I tried the solutions listed in this article but unfortunately none of them worked, but you are free to try them out for yourself:

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/100-disk-usage-windows-10-fixed/

So I'm gonna send this SSD back and try another one. Hope this will fix my issue.